Wayne Gretzky-Style ‘Field Sense’ May Be Teachable
I thought that this was really super interesting, and that it related to footbag as much as hockey or tennis. Check it out:
This discovery fit with something Farrow and other tennis researchers had already suspected: Reflex speed is not the key factor in returning a serve. “People have tested casual players and experts, and their reaction times are essentially the same,” Farrow says. The fact that Roger Federer can drill back a 140-mile-per-hour serve is partly a matter of muscle control. But it’s also about processing subtle visual cues to predict where the ball will go and get to the right spot.
None of this was enough to make Farrow the hero of the clubhouse. Proving that anticipation mattered was one thing. The big question was, could it be taught? Farrow wanted to try, but he would be careful to not make the same mistake he had made with himself. He instructed some of the players from each group not to worry about predicting the direction of the serve but, instead, to focus on estimating its speed. The exercise was intended to force receivers to notice things like the angle of the racket head and the twist of a server’s shoulders relative to his hips — all kinematic cues that also contribute to a serve’s direction. Best of all, the connections would happen unconsciously. “It’s called implicit learning,” Farrow says. “We’re getting them used to watching for the right stuff, things like more-spin-equals-less-speed, but they don’t even know that they’re doing it.”
